This leads to a daily capacity of 140 take-offs and landings per day, as opposed to just 16 which are scheduled for the first day of passenger flights after the airport of Murcia-San Javier closes to civilian traffic the previous evening at 23.00. However, the expectation is that during 2019 passenger numbers will be comparable to those at San Javier in 2018, with around 8,600 flights carrying some 1.2 million passengers to and from the Costa Cálida.

As the airport management company Aena prepares for the switch from San Javier to Corvera, the night of 14th/15th January will be a busy one on many fronts as preparations are made to make the changeover as smooth as possible. All but two of the 80 or so Aena staff currently employed at San Javier will be transferred to Corvera with no loss of employee rights or privileges, having taken part in numerous training and preparation exercises over the last couple of months, and the only exceptions concern two employees who have instead opted to be transferred to others among the 46 airports currently run by the company in Spain: their roles will be filled by staff transferred from other airports.

At the same time, during the night some 200 road signs will be altered to avoid any airport traffic being directed to San Javier on the shore of the Mar Menor instead of the new facility in Corvera!

As has been the case in recent years it is expected that around 80 per cent of passengers this year at Corvera will be flying between the Region of Murcia and the UK, although some interesting additions to the flight schedules are in the pipeline for the summer. Norwegian will operate services to and from four destinations in their home country (Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger and Trondheim), Jet2.com will be returning to the roster with connections to Leeds-Bradford and Manchester, Volotea will be flying to and from Oviedo in the northern Spanish region of Asturias and there are hopes that flights to and from Madrid and Barcelona may also be re-established, after disappearing from the departures and arrivals boards at San Javier in recent years.

Perhaps the most eye-catching novelty, though, is that Smartwings are to extend the charter flights they operated last summer to include a direct route to and from Prague, with connections to Moscow and other destinations.

However, all that lies in the future: the first step is for the switch to go ahead on 15th January and for any initial teething problems to be overcome before the start of the summer flight schedule, and for the time being all attention is focussed on the long-awaited first passenger flights at the “Aeropuerto Internacional Región de Murcia Juan de la Cierva” (or Corvera airport, as most people will continue to refer to it)!

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